Original subtitles

Narrator: In Scotland, one of the nation's

best-known whisky-makers has built a new distillery.

Dropped into the hillside above the River Spey,

it's unlike any other.

[intense piano music]

It could be a structure from the Cold War,

or something out of James Bond...

A year after it was opened,

it's become a stop on the tourist trail,

and not just for the whisky.

The competition to design this most unusual of distilleries

was won by the London-based partnership

of Richard Rogers, Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour.

And to Graham Stirk fell the task of re-imagining

an age-old process for the 21st century.

Graham Stirk: The whole point was the mystery revealed.

Suddenly this distillery pops up.

And the mystery revealed was why we were very interested in...

The word we used in the presentation was this is...

this is Jules Verne.

This is something where you find

a piece of almost Victorian engineering buried

and still functioning below ground.

And it was the contrast of the two which was actually

really, really important.

[intense and quick piano music]

[upbeat percussive ensemble music]

Narrator: Few architects can afford to work in a building

they designed.

Graham Stirk does.

His office is in Leadenhall Street

in the City of London,

in the building affectionately known as the 'Cheesegrater',

which sprang from his drawing board in 2000

and cost its developers £340 million.

From his desk he can see - and almost touch -

the Lloyds Headquarters,

on which he worked over thirty years ago,

when he first joined Richard Rogers,

the architect who gave the world the Pompidou Centre.

The Lloyd's Building is still a source of wonder to him...

[rhythmic piano ensemble music]

Graham: When I joined, Lloyds of London was a hole in the ground.

They'd done Pompidou, so...

..and...

..it's interesting...

..coming out of college

and then finding yourself on something like that,

I mean, maybe some people are cooler than I,

but I... I found it... God, I was...

..I found it terrifying.

And... it's all pre- computer, as well.

Lloyds of London. So, it's all hand drawn.

Try to find your way around it.

The first year was...

..I learnt a great deal.

Narrator: Graham Stirk came to work for Richard Rogers in 1983,

rapidly became a director,

and, in 2007, Rogers changed the name of his practice

to reflect Stirk and Ivan Harbour's contribution

to the business.

There's a name and a reputation to live up to.

Which means there is pressure in Graham Stirk's everyday life,

though you would hardly know it.

With his team, he's become used to drawing buildings,

which are complex,

not only in their appearance, but also in the way they work.

And, over the years, he's adjusted his mind

to design at scale - something not all architects achieve.

[rhythmic and whimsical piano music]

Size marks out his buildings,

and may have influenced the Scottish whisky giant,

Macallan, when it chose him to design a new distillery

and visitor experience on their site in north-east Scotland,

Speyside, the spiritual home of the many firms -

big and small,

which produce what Scots like to call 'the water of life.'

[fervent string music]

But, first, there was a competition to be won,

which meant a crash course

in the mechanics of whisky production.

Graham: I found... I found it fascinating

and went, what? What do this...

..what does this equipment look like?

So, we were Googling what the equipment was like,

we were... well, so we got all the stills wrong,

the wrong shapes in the first one.

Was... what does... and then... what...

the... you know, we were trying to understand

what this equipment was,

and then we realised as well at the competition,

we knew it wasn't going to be a modern art gallery.

It wasn't going to be this beautiful,

cool space with a few beautiful stills sat within it, you know?

It's an industrial production.

And at that time, this idea of moving it into a big,

rectangular building with circular...

..each circle represents,

what is required to make five million litres

of whiskey a year.

And so we... we decided in terms of the legibility

that each would then represent something that would inform

the bulge in... in the roof.

I suppose the artistry is... it's not all the same.

Where does one enter the building?

And, which is why when they rock, they roll

and then one goes higher to signal the entrance.

[intriguing orchestral music]

Narrator: Graham Stirk's first sketches included a diagram

that showed the component parts of production.

Then came a series of sketches of the humped roofs

that would eventually sit above the whisky-producing stills.

The sketch was inputted to a computer

and refined into a wire diagram modelling

not only the overall shape, but also the individual squares

that would make up the roof...

..squares which would contain vegetation

to help it blend into the landscape.

And, the wire diagram, a 2D image on a screen,

was turned into a physical model,

so that the team could get up close and personal

with the spaces they were designing.

But, through all the iterations of the design,

from plans to technical drawings,

the scheme never moved far

from Graham Stirk's first sketch.

[playful string orchestral music]

[suspenseful single notes]

Graham Hutcheon: Graham Stirk kind of hit it on the head.

He got the lie of the land right,

he got... sympathy with the environment it was in,

and he came up with some really interesting ideas

from the roof to the visitor centre

being part of the whole building

and that kind of symbiosis of brand and operations

was really, really well understood.

He kind of got the hard wire.

[emotive piano music]

Two things inspired us.

The design and the concept as...

..as presented, and Graham himself.

The passion - he's quite a quiet and reserved individual,

but the passion come out of him

when he presented this... this wonderful concept.

And actually what we've got in reality is not too far removed

from the original concept that was presented in 2012.

[striking single note from an organ]

Graham Stirk: It's a thing that sometimes we use,

it's... it begins as a diagram, but the diagram,

you can't start with a diagram

and just follow a logical process

and arrive at a building.

You have to test the architectural possibilities

of how something can resolve the complexity

of this problem elegantly, and begin to give meaning and drama

to the process that's taking place within,

in this particular instance.

You have to artificially accelerate...

..where a building may head,

because you need to create visual images.

It's... we used to do it with evocative sketches.

It's difficult to hide or to keep loose,

especially with our form of architecture

it's not something you just say that's the image.

You know, these things take an awful lot of evolution.

[emotive orchestral music]

Narrator: There is a marked difference between designing

for the City of London

and designing for the countryside of Scotland.

Graham Stirk didn't immediately walk the site,

but thinking about it from his desk in London

he realised that his building must complement

the surrounding hills,

blend in... ideally sink in,

though his team knew that would be expensive.

[emotive string music]

Graham Stirk: I prefer to test ideas and then view something.

Mainly because it's so possible to be able to explore things

through terrain relationships.

The idea of making it part of the landscape

was which form of architecture do we derive.

We... if we were in an open field

or in a valley as a stand-alone building,

you could create something that sits

as a very beautiful contrast to that.

This had a backdrop of a whole series

of maturation facility buildings,

which basically hold much of the spirit for ten years minimum.

And then you had a small village adjacent to it,

which is the existing facility,

which has its utilitarian components

and the older maturation sheds.

What form of architecture do you introduce?

So, our view was to make something

which was of a landscape,

but very clearly a man-made landscape.

Graham Hutcheon: Whether in London or here, we met him,

and the ideas would just come rolling out

and he'd draw them down and nothing is discarded.

He keeps all the drawings, and they're in a book, actually,

and many of these sketches he did.

And they became part of the process.

So, he has a talent, there's no doubt about that,

that it's terrific to watch.

But as an engineer myself, as an engineer,

what I was impressed by Graham and his team

is he understood the practicalities of what

they were doing.

Can you build it? Can you make it?

It gave our construction team some real challenges,

to be perfectly honest.

But they got through it and they got through it together.

And if it didn't work, they'd tweak it

and change the design as they went along.

But fundamentally, the team were terrific.

It was a great experience over 39 months of a build, yeah.

Narrator: Though the new distillery would be sunk

into the hillside,

its roof would be there for all to see.

It would take its cue from the surrounding hills

and it would be a good example of something architects

often talk about, form following function.

Toby Jeavons: The roof is the response to the landscape.

It is deliberately rotational in its form,

which is a reflection of the arrangement,

the very particular arrangement, of the production equipment

that we laid down in these repetitive cells.

It's also very much a system.

So, the accentuation over the visitor experience

obviously gives you that slightly cathedral like space

as a visitor, particularly when you move into...

..from the compression of the entrance

out into the visitor experience.

And then the notion of this sort of exhibition space here,

the roof geometry flattens out,

and the idea is that it's an extrusion.

In theory it could keep going.

It's no longer a response to the production equipment

that is happening underneath.

So yeah, it's localised, so it's an approach

and a response to the activities that are happening beneath.

We don't have a fermentation room and a still room.

We have a cell of production that...

..that collectively produces five million litres of...

..of spirits.

That can then be replicated numerous times.

Once there was a decision to want to respond sensitively

in this location...

..the essence of a concept, I think,

began to form.

Narrator: Graham Stirk's design was so radically different

from anything on Speyside, where most distilleries

have grown up organically and operate on a small scale.

That there was a question mark over whether Macallan

would be prepared to invest the money required to realise it.

And, if the answer was yes, would they stay the course

over four years of construction,

footing the bill for the smart interior

whose details the architect and his team believed

were as important as the exterior.

Graham Hutcheon: And my mantra was we cannot remove

the design intent.

Regardless of the pressures we're under from...

..there's always budgetary pressures

in these kind of projects and companies go down

and you've got to change the supplier.

The design intent was fundamental.

We had to deliver the wow factor

that we were trying to deliver from the very outset.

So yeah, we had to hold the line, we had to work together,

we had to compromise,

and agree a way forward,

and it was a very refreshing experience.

[emotive piano ensemble music]

[striking orchestral music]

[fervent string music]

Narrator: We know Richard Rogers,

now Lord Rogers of Riverside,

for the Pompidou Centre in Paris, 1971,

and the Lloyd's Register Headquarters

in the City of London, in 1988.

Today, his practice thrives on the work of 200 staff

led by the two partners whose names were added to the practice

in 2007...

..Ivan Harbour, his 'Maggie's Centre' in London

and Terminal four at Madrid Airport,

both won the Stirling Prize.

And, Graham Stirk, born in Leeds, a good drawer at school,

later a scholarship student at the Architectural Association,

who was introduced to Richard Rogers in the early 1980s,

and never looked back.

Nearly four decades later, Graham Stirk takes the credit

for projects such as Number One Hyde Park,

and the Leadenhall Building, the Wedge,

that became to Londoners the 'Cheesegrater'.

Graham Stirk: This building is interesting.

Having worked on Lloyds of London 30-odd years earlier,

this was a speculative office building

that had no known end user at that time.

We were opposite the most bespoke headquarters building

for a world organisation on the opposite side of the road.

And the prospect is terrifying.

When the... you know, the budget similarities

of the legibility of Lloyds,

which is a beautiful diagram, as you fully know...

..and how does one manifest that same level of clarity

of communicating and celebrating everything that's necessary

to make a modern building work,

it's a trip round the size museum,

slightly more elegantly presented,

is... the prospect is terrifying

and the whole mechanisms, cost profiles,

regulations, everything have all changed since then.

So, we have to kind of keep moving with each of the shifts

to see whether we could actually...

..we can't replicate it.

But we can still be as communicative

with what it is we're trying to... design.

Narrator: The Leadenhall Building was adjusted

during its design, to lean back.

Why? To protect views of St Paul's Cathedral.

It was just one of the moments

that gave Graham Stirk sleepless nights.

Graham Stirk: I suppose at that time,

we fill our site.

Historically, building towers was always about

being able to give the residual amount of site

over to public space.

This had to create something unusual,

it would create a lot more permeability,

where if you've ever... I now work in...

..in the city of London.

It is incredibly congested public realm.

It's too valuable for anything to be given up.

So, the creation of something

that could begin to create incidental spatial drama

as one moves through the streets is important.

It's... essentially, it's a creation of public realm,

inception of the plan so you can't see the public spacing

from the air.

Confidence comes with you at different particular stages

when things are going well.

It's a temporary, fleeting thing.

It's a real drag, if I was honest. It's a real drag.

And... I suppose there are times

when you talk in hindsight of how excited and fantastic.

There are other times when it's really difficult. Really ugly.

And... stressful.

But in a sense you are part of a much wider process.

I suppose it's trying to maintain some sense

of integrity within a much wider field

of decision making processes

that are involved in large scale buildings.

Narrator: The Leadenhall Building

took fourteen years of Graham Stirk's life, from 2000 to 2014.

But in 2004,

he also started sketching something very different,

a new winery for a co-operative in the Ribera del Duero region

of Spain.

Looking back, we can see some of the shapes he would later use

on the distillery in Scotland.

Graham Stirk: I think it's important sometimes

to have a very powerful... philosophic approach,

which doesn't necessarily mean

that you're producing a particular style of building

that you then wish to kind of test against

lots of different typologies.

So, building an agro-industrial shed in Protos

was... will make a very, very beautiful, noble shed.

And it's beautifully expressive of how it's made.

It communicates through a glass

where people can see the processes that take place.

It creates a very, very beautiful public realm.

Most of these buildings have to have a relationship

not only to those that are using the building,

but also those that don't use it.

So, we have to oscillate between the expectations of our client

and the wider expectations of society.

[emotive string music]

Narrator: The winery in Spain was designed for the weather.

Graham Stirk could afford to make a light structure.

In Scotland, something chunkier would be required.

And it would be bigger... much bigger.

It would be unique.

[romantic string orchestral music]

Graham Stirk: I mean, for us, we're trying to... you know,

like everyone, we're trying to find a relevant vocabulary

for the 21st century.

[stirring orchestral music]

Narrator: Perhaps the greatest challenge

in the art of architecture

is ensuring that what you draw is what you get.

It's one thing to conceptualise a building,

from the initial sketch through computer renders

to the technical drawings that will be used on site.

It is quite another to be there when your design is executed.

And the road to that point can be very long.

Toby Jeavons: There were many challenges over the way,

so it's... it's...

..it's a scheme of very high ambition,

located in a fairly remote part of the country.

It required the absolute commitment of everybody involved

from all of the design team, the client, principally,

who had the original ambition to do something quite different

within the industry.

Down to all of the contractors involved.

I think the level of coordination

that has been achieved,

which was something that we aspired to do collectively

as a team, is a testament to that commitment and hard work

that everybody put in.

That's... that's sort of manifest in two distinct areas,

I think. First of all is the integration

between the process equipment,

the actual whiskey making equipment,

and the hardware of the building, if we will.

Both within the logistic coordination

of bringing all of this production equipment into place.

The various integration of... of the computer modelling

that was used and exchanged both between the design,

the building shell and core design team,

and the process engineers and Forsyths

who were leading the design

and installation of the process equipment.

That I think is fantastic,

and the way in which all the process equipment

sits within this open grillage...

..gantry floor, is something to be seen.

And then the coordination of the timber roof.

So, the timber roof, with its primary steel support,

and the concrete,

is similarly the integration coordination required

for those three component parts to come together,

in the location, potentially in the weather, working at height.

I think they were some real challenges,

which were set to the whole team.

All the timber's coming from Austria.

The primary steelwork's made in... just outside York.

So, that final level of design integration was essential,

and then the physical tolerances

of bringing these component parts together.

[elevating ensemble music]

No-one wanted to be the weak link that drops the ball.

Narrator: The art of architecture

became the art of construction as the engineers took

Graham Stirk's design and created it on the ground...

including the unique timber roof.

Bob Lang: Timber is a particularly appropriate

material here, because it is lightweight, and in engineering,

you can actually reach a situation

where you're putting material in to haul material up

So, what we did was to make the permanent structure

as light as we could, and also take advantage of the geometry,

because there was inherent stiffness in the geometry.

However, the... the concrete structure,

the bit that retains the earth,

is... is... is almost completely divorced

from the timber roof.

That is to say the roof sits on the concrete.

It's quite often the case that the walls

that hold the earth back will be resisted by the roof.

We completely didn't want that.

So, any... any lateral force,

any disturbing force of the roof,

is taken by this steel structure here.

So any... could be snow that's banked heavily on one side,

it could be the wind, it could be some thermal movement,

several, several things.

But the whole of the lateral resistance

is taken in this frame here.

And this frame has two purposes. One is to take the lateral load.

The other one is to take the vertical load.

So vertical load. Lateral load goes here.

Only vertical load goes into the surrounding structure.

And what that means is that the timber can be as light

as we can possibly make it,

because we're not imposing extraneous forces

from the earth on it.

Narrator: Artists' impressions and models can only go so far.

As the actual building emerged

the project architect, on site every two weeks,

began to wonder how it would be received

by the residents of Speyside.

Toby Jeavons: I think the local community liked it.

It was clearly a building of some quality

and I think everybody appreciated that

and they knew what that would do to the local economy,

the local tourism, the local workforce opportunities.

So, I think it very positively received.

And the... the sympathetic way in which it was a response

to the landscape, I think was very well received.

Both at the formal, public consultation that happened

as part of the planning process

and then just anecdotally during the course of construction.

I think they're very appreciative of the fact

that it wasn't a... a sort of arrogant, bombastic gesture.

Graham Hutcheon: So I had responsibility for delivering

the project.

But the day to day management was my team.

And I think they had some rocky roads.

And Graham warned us early doors

that we would have some interesting challenges

along the way, whether it's materials selection

or budget or one or two serious decisions we had to make

with the visitor centre.

But we got through it,

and I think the relationship was very, very good.

The relationship with the architect was very good,

as was the relationship with the construction company,

and the process organisations we used.

And we had to work in a collaborative way

to deliver what we delivered.

Narrator: When Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and partners

won the competition to design this distillery,

Macallan's idea was that there would be a visitor centre

alongside, but separate.

Graham Stirk and his team thought it should, instead,

be part of the main building.

But, the idea of having the public in a space,

which was also occupied by millions of litres

of flammable alcohol

would give Health and Safety Officers nightmares.

Graham Stirk: The process of achieving that

was pretty difficult.

But if you didn't have the naivete

of trying to make that special... experience

of being able to walk in the main still house

and see all of this... this... oh, iceberg of pot stuff,

because mostly when you see whiskey, you see stills.

You don't see all this massive other vessels

that are vital in the process.

For us, it's about... there's a word they used,

which is integrity, and what you are seeing - I suppose it is.

It's about the integrity of the experience.

Toby Jeavons: Locating the visitor experience

hard up against the production facility

meant that we needed a separating wall.

It was always very important

that you could see from the visitor experience,

and we knew that the end of the visitor experience

is likely to be your opportunity to taste the product,

is going to be the bar, and a dwelling... a dwelling space.

And so from this location, it was always very important

you could look back into the production facility

see all of the component parts,

and also from the lower level,

where you've made your way into the visitor experience,

that again, you've got this full ten metre tall glass wall

that allows you to see all of the production.

Because some visitors may not actually then choose

to do the tour.

So, they can be in the visitor experience,

which is free for all to enter and still see this.

To achieve a two hour firewall to this scale in glazing

was quite a challenge.

And after looking at a number of options,

we decided that a sprinkler based, drencher system

would be the most appropriate way to deal with this,

whilst keeping the glazing as clear

and as transparent as possible.

[striking ensemble music]

Narrator: Something like this had never been done before.

Testing a prototype of the glass firewall alone

cost half a million pounds.

But it was worth it.

The distillery and the visitor centre became one.

[emotive piano ensemble music]

Graham Hutcheon: You've got to put yourself

in the architect's head, I guess.

I mean, he came up, he knew the views,

he knew the views to the Ben,

the views to the Spey, the views along the building,

before it was built.

So, he had the concept 15 metres up

from the ground to see what it's going to look like,

how it's going to lie, how it fits,

the view right down the building.

And that's their expertise, I guess.

They have a vision

and an ability to turn that vision into reality,

and it's really very, very interesting

to see it come out for real.

[orchestral crescendo]

[emotive orchestral music]

Narrator: The Macallan Distillery on Speyside

has been open for less than a year,

yet it looks almost untouched.

It's a huge task keeping all this glass and steel

free from smear and stains,

keeping the visitor-centre fresh,

ordering the tables and chairs

with such architectural precision

that they appear part of Graham Stirk's design.

[whimsical orchestral music]

There is regimentation everywhere.

The bottles on the whisky wall,

representing almost 200 years of distilling

are lit by invisible lights,

part of a multi-million pound illumination scheme.

The copper stills, made by a firm just down the road

march together in absolute alignment,

glowing in the morning light,

waiting for the first of the day's visitors.

They will come not just to taste,

but to see this new temple to the art of whisky production.

And they will see it through the eyes of an architect

who worked on the Lloyds building all those years ago,

and who still believes on showing visitors

how a building works.

Graham Stirk: To some extent,

we really did say a number of times,

we'll make it

the most beautifully coordinated distillery on earth.

And obviously we can't do that alone.

We have to hope it's... you know,

specialists who understand this,

but they set up a fantastic relationship

with our team to be able to do what is essentially

this arranged around a circle and the pipes.

If you look down there, it's all symmetrical.

And the whole point is,

every part of it you can actually see the complexity,

which has been treated with the same amount of care.

And it's the care of craftsmanship.

And the care of craftsmanship

it's not... it's just a big statement

and then it's all through there and we'll show you a few stills.

It's everything.

Everything is visible, and it's not using fancy materials.

It's just beautifully, carefully coordinated.

What do modern buildings bring beyond supergraphic shapes?

How can you describe what... how they function,

how they work, and celebrate it

and make it into a beautiful, beautiful pieces

that are given different scales

and hierarchies within the overall complexity of the image?

[fervent orchestral music]

Narrator: Graham Stirk wanted

to show all parts of the process of making whisky

but, from his first design, one was missing,

simply because it was not part of the original brief.

On this historic site sits thousands of barrels of whisky

quietly ageing in casks

that have previously been used to mature sherry

in the bodegas of Jerez de la Frontera.

But this vital element was not to be shown

in the new building, until the design was altered

to include a cave privée, a sort of 'holy of holies'

into which small groups are escorted

to pay homage to the 'water of life'.

[soulful piano]

Graham Hutcheon: The cave privée planned bar

was on a plain bit of paper, he just hand drew it.

And many of his concepts were hand drawn.

And then they produced a model,

obviously, when they were further down the process.

And all these hand drawings,

to scale, I don't know how he does it,

became a reality.

Graham Stirk: The scaling of these

start to reflect some of the incredible ingenuity

of all of those groups of engineers, you know,

everyone involved, how one can create something

that starts to say something beyond pure art.

[soulful piano music]

Graham Hutcheon: We had our... A number of openings

over a week, and we brought some clients and some guests,

and we had this wow factor.

Sitting in the project it was relief more than anything else,

that it was finally done.

We've still got snagging to do,

we know the project's still to go on.

But to everybody else, that was the day,

and I think it was a relief for me.

Certainly for me and my team.

[emotive piano ensemble music]

Now, we're starting to enjoy it

because we're getting people coming to see what we've done,

and most are impressed, I believe.

And we think we've done a pretty good job at the end of the day.

[striking piano music]

The really scary thing is once you've built it,

will it produce the spirit you wanted it to produce?

And that's the real secret.

[serenading classical piano]

Graham Stirk: As it's evolved, I... it's... it's gone beyond

what I imagined,

and sometimes... sometimes, you know,

I've always been involved

but not at the same intensity as the first few years.

But it's interesting, the points of principle hang clear,

but then each piece then finds a more...

..a more elegant way of manifesting itself

from those first aspirations.

People don't really teach you to do big, urban buildings.

You might do a few but the process of learning,

to go from what you're exploring as a student

to then suddenly:

You're not handed it. It's like, well, have a go.

You have to evolve that.

But there's something about Macallan for me, personally,

that took me back to a period

where actually it made you want to go into... into architecture.

It was the primary reasons why you want to go into it.

I suppose everyone secretly wants to be, you know,

involved in something that people

beyond your own field might find fantastic, attractive, exciting.

And that's... it's... you don't always get that.

We're incredibly proud of it.

Absolutely thrilled to pieces with it.

[soulful piano music]

Narrator: Next time...

In Washington, the scene of the biggest protest

in the history of America's civil rights movement,

the British architect Sir David Adjaye

has designed a museum for the ages.

It documents the struggle by African-Americans

to be "free at last".

This is a very important piece of democratic theatre

and the African-American community felt that

they should be represented, their narrative about their

contribution to what America is needed to be represented.

I made a conscious decision that the building was not going to be

a vessel just to put things in.

It wasn't going to be just a sort of piece of architecture

that would have something put in it that had a disconnect.

It felt that the story was so prescient

that the building had to also be part of the narrative.

It had to be part of the story.